You won't have to ignore this stuff for long. Pretty soon it'll be mandatory to keep up.

I've been a senior engineer doing large scale active-active, five nines distributed systems that process billions of dollars of transactions daily. These are well thought out systems with 20+ folks on design document reviews.

Not all of the work falls into that category, though. There's so much plumbing and maintenance and wiring of new features and requirements.

On that stuff, I'm getting ten times the amount of work done with AI than I was before. I could replace the juniors on my team with just myself if I needed to and still get all of our combined work done.

Engineers using AI are going to replace anyone not using AI.

In fact, now is the time to start a startup and "fire" all of these incumbent SaaS companies. You can make reasonable progress quickly and duplicate much of what many companies do without much effort.

If you haven't tried this stuff, you need to. I'm not kidding. You will easily 10x your productivity.

I'm not saying don't review your own code. Please do.

But Claude emits reasonable Rust and Java and C++. It's not just for JavaScript toys anymore.

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Edit:

Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.

I'm not lying about this.

I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.

The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here, to us and to our career. And these models are quite usable for production code.

I can point Claude to a Rust HTTP handler and say, "using this example [file path], write a new endpoint that handles video file uploads, extracts the metadata, creates a thumbnail, uploads them to the cloud storage, and creates the relevant database records."

And it does it in a minute.

I review the code. It's as if I had written it. Maybe a change here or there.

Real production Rust code, 100 - 500 LOC, one shotted in one minute. It even installs the routes and understands the HTTP framework DSL. It even codegens Swagger API documentation and somehow understands the proc macro DSL that takes Rust five minutes to compile.

This tech is wizardry. It's the sci fi stuff we dreamed of as kids.

I don't get the sour opinions. The only thing to fear is big tech monopolozation.

I suppose the other thing to worry about is what's going to happen to our cushy $400k salaries. But if you make yourself useful, I think it'll work out just fine.

Perhaps more than fine if you're able to leverage this to get ahead and fire your employer. You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.

I'm not saying non-engineers will be able to do this. I'm saying engineers are well positioned to leverage this.

I'm not saying that you shouldn't use AI.

There was a submission to a blog post discussing applications of AI but it got killed for some reason.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46750927

I remain convinced that if you use AI to write code then your product will sooner or later turn into a buggy mess. I think this will remain the case until they figure out how to make a proper memory system. Until then, we still have to use our brains as the memory system.

One strategy I've seen that I like is using AI to prototype, but then write actual code yourself. This is what the Ghostty guy does I believe.

I agree that AI can write decent Rust code, but Rust is not a panacea. From what I heard, Cursor has a lot of vibe-coded Rust code, but it didn't save it from being, as I said, a buggy mess.

> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening. > > I'm not lying about this. > > I provided my background so you'd understand the context of my claims. I have a solid background in tech.

There are lots of people claiming this. Many of whom have a solid background. Every now and then I check out someone's claim (checking the code they've generated). I've yet to find an AI-generated codebase that passed that check so far.

Perhaps yours is the one that does, but as we can't see the code for ourselves, there's no way for us to really know. And it's hard to take your word for it when there are so many people falsely making the same claims.

I expect a lot of HNers have had this experience.

> "The same thing that happened to illustration and art is happening here"

What are you talking about? Illustrators and artists are not being replaced by AI or required to use AI to "keep up" in the vast majority of environments.

> "I don't get the sour opinions."

The reasoning for folks' "sour opinions" has been very well-documented, especially here on HN. This comment reads like people don't like AI because they think it's slow or something, which is not the case.

> Holy hell HN, downvoted to -4 in record time. Y'all don't like what's happening, but it's really happening.

I gave you an upvote FWIW, after all, I mean, my job's codebase is already a buggy mess, so it doesn't hurt to throw AI on it, which is what I do.

> You might not need your employer anymore. If you can do sales and wear many hats, you'll do exceedingly well.

Wasn't this the case before AI as well?

> I've been

so not now, then?